How Does Hosseini Represent Amir’s Feelings About Hassan Leaving?

Hosseini represents Amir’s feelings in many different ways throughout the Kite Runner. From after the rape scene that occurs between Hassan and Assef, Amir gains a horrible sense of guilt which remains with him throughout the whole remainder of the book. These feelings of guilt then lead to him being ashamed of himself, but instead of dealing with those feelings openly, he harbours them and then uses the first opportunity he can find to get rid of what he sees as the source of his guilt--Hassan.
From the point Amir decided he was going to try and get rid of Hassan, he had gained a sense of confidence that made him believe that if Hassan was out of the way then he would lose his sense of guilt and be able to go back to living his care free life again. But this changed suddenly when Amir saw Hassan and Ali invited back to his father’s office and noticed their red eyes from crying and he states “...And I wondered how and when I had become capable of causing this kind of pain.” This quote shows how Hosseini wants the reader to acknowledge how Amir is aware of his actions and he is still taking full account for what he has done, and deep within he will always carry the guilt for not helping his friend.
Moving onto when Hassan accepts taking the watch and money even when Amir and the reader both know that it was Amir himself who had planted them, allows Hosseini to represent the side of Amir that shows his ignorance towards Hassan dedication and devotion to him. To take things back to another point at the start of the book , the fact that Amir’s first word was ‘Baba’ in who he believed was the most important person to him, was just how as Hassan’s first words were ‘Amir’ he believed he was the most important to him. Amir speaks “I flinched, like I had been slapped. My heart sank and I almost blurted out the truth.” The sheer fact Amir was so shocked over Hassan taking the blame and not leaving Amir the accused reinforces how little Amir acknowledged Hassan's respect. Even from this moment before Hassan left, Hosseini ensured the reader understood the brotherhood between the two boys and the huge amount of respect that was one sided in the relationship between them. Amir's and Hassan's friendship is distinctly lopsided, Hassan is left doing all the compromising and having to accept the abuse Amir gives him. This is strengthened when Amir proves that he is not a friend to Hassan when he sees Hassan being horribly and violently abused by the perverted bully Assef but does nothing to stop it. Hosseini moves onto describe Amir’s feeling in a much more discrete way when he goes into detail about Baba’s reaction. “Then I saw Baba do something I had never seen before: he cried.” This small detail about Baba leads back on how Amir should remain to feel guilty for what he has caused, as if he had tried to help Hassan when he was about to be abused then they could both have supported each other and then he wouldn’t have had to try and remove his guilt by trying to get rid of Hassan. Which has then caused his father to be so upset that he has cried, the fact that to Amir his Baba was such a powerful figure and this has caused such a dire reaction supports the concept that Amir has yet again failed his father even though in a previous chapter Amir had said the reason he hadn’t helped Hassan was to receive his father’s love. “I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right: Nothing was free in this world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba.” But from this moment we realised that again Amir had failed and his father was left now even more upset. Hosseini uses Baba’s tears to represent Amir’s feelings towards Hassan's leaving as a failure on his behalf.
The most significant scene that Hosseini uses to represent Amir’s feelings about Hassan leaving is the final paragraph on page 101. It describes how the unlikely event of rain during the summer had occurred when Hassan left. This dramatic use of pathetic fallacy allows Hosseini to emphasise how even though it rarely rains in Kabul, the fact that Hassan has left is really a very big issue for Amir even if he isn’t physically accepting it at its face value. Amir considers running to the car before Hassan leaves to confess to all he’s done as if he’s in a film “but this was no Hindi movie.” The fact Hosseini refers to Amir and Hassan’s life to not be a Hindi movie represents the true grit of friendship and how it wasn’t a simplistic friendship that could easily be solved with hugging but that a bigger level of trust was going to have to be re built in order to remove Amir’s guilt – which in the end resulted in him adopting and caring for Hassan’s orphaned son Sohrab.
The final sentence before Hosseini moves on from the friendship between Amir and Hassan is possibly the most important “I stepped back and all I saw was rain through window panes that looked like melting silver.” The fact Hossieni uses melting silver to describe the rain pouring down reinforces the breaking of such a tight bond that Amir and Hassan once held. Silver is known to be an expensive metal with strong qualities but also known to be a beautiful looking metal. When Hosseini describes melting silver, it shows the reader that however strong and beautiful the friendship once was it was now disintegrating and even if when tried to be remoulded a metal will never take its first shape back perfectly- reinforcing that the friendship before the rape would never come back.
Overall I believe Hosseini represents Amir’s feelings about Hassan leaving in many different ways, from describing Babas tears but also by showing how Hassan is still willing to stick up for him. The use of pathetic fallacy and detailed paragraphs of Amir’s feelings of betrayal allow the reader to fully understand the feelings.…...

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